I was really sure I made a thread on this, but it's not anywhere to be found... so I guess here's a new one! Revealed at E3 2018, Satisfactory is an FPS, open-world factory building sim. The easiest way to look at it is like an FPS Factorio. I was sold on that first reveal video, but you know you can never trust what you see at E3! This weekend they opened up the alpha to everyone who'd applied for it and the NDA lifted so it's being streamed all over the place. I believe it was ranked about 7th on Twitch last night! Even moving it from Steam to an Epic Games Store timed (12 month) exclusive didn't seem to hamper it too much! EARLY ACCESS LAUNCH - Tuesday 19th of March 2019 £26.99 I played it with a friend for a few hours last night while he streamed and it was fantastic! Very few bugs for a closed alpha, most of mine were related to me being on the other side of the planet to the host with fairly slow internet speeds and a PC that only just scrapes by the minimum specs. I hate the over-use of "beautiful" and "polished" but it really is both of those things! We're going to play again tonight and I think we're quite close to the end of progression available in the alpha. The map is waaaay bigger than I expected, it has caves too so that makes it feel even bigger to explore. It's really addictive and a nice addition to the genre site | twitter | discord
Logged in with 3 friends on the open alpha last weekend and it was absolutely sublime...for the 4 hours it took us to do everything there was to do. Hear me out, as I know it was a free preview with intentionally limited content, but I just cannot see game longevity even close to Factorio. Having reviewed the Satisfactory wiki for information on the tiers of the game that were locked for the free weekend, there is very little meaningful content still to be released. Most of the parts used throughout the remainder of the game are those that we've already manufactured, and only needed in slightly increased quantities than we've already been producing. It just doesn't feel like there needs to be "a factory" ala Factorio. The lack of variety in available parts, alongside how OP the manual crafting bench is means that with even just 1 friend online there is little point in investing any resources into any form of automation at all! To avoid total tedium you will need to use automatic miners, smelters and conveyor belts to storage stacks, but truthfully nothing else. I realise the above paragraph focuses on essentially zerging content and "completing the game" and that this is not everyone's play-style. One of the other popular ways of playing these types of game - and this is a play-style I personally particularly enjoy - centres around completeness and optimisation... Unfortunately, even ignoring how OP manual crafting is, the issue of variety of parts (or lack thereof) combined with the ability to vertically stack containers and conveyors seemingly-infinitely, means there is basically nothing to optimise as long as you gave initial object placement even 10 seconds forethought... While the 3D element of the game is fantastic visually it really does detract from traditionally factoryesque gameplay. If the devs add in a true top-down view (not the looktower) then this might awake everyone's innate desire to have order and uniformity... and therefore maybe fewer spaghetti conveyor belts, but I still don't see people pursuing tidiness when overall base size just isn't that large? I hope this changes somehow as I did really enjoy my time playing... and I will still buy it at some point... but my friends have been put off and now won't commit to getting it until it's cheaper, fixed, or appears on steam
Wow, could not have had a more opposite experience of the weekend if I tried Ended up putting about 15hrs into it in the end. 10+ with friends and the rest solo. We did complete all the available tiers in that alpha (the regular alpha has more) but we kept finding things to do as we played. Exploring was fun, there's a biome that looks so much like the Coral Highlands (MHW) it's uncanny! I befriended a lizard doggo and it brought me all sorts of fancy ores I couldn't yet use! Then there's the mazes, the races, the jump-pad routes and the other silly games you can make up to play with friends. They have actually categorically stated there will be no top-down view. It's only an Epic exclusive for a year. So could go to Steam and consoles after that.
